Ready to learn how to start a side hustle while working full-time? If so, this probably sounds familiar…
You’re in a position where you have a 9-5 job and you are considering doing something on the side. However, you are holding back because you don’t think you have enough time, or you are concerned about how you’ll fit a side hustle into your schedule.
In this post we want to talk about how to start a side hustling while working full-time. It’s definitely possible, and with the right strategies you can actually make it work very well. Here are some master tips and strategies on how to get started and make money from your side hustles.
How to Start a Side Hustle While Working Full-Time
Mindset
From a mindset perspective, the first thing you really have to think about is why you want to start your side business or side hustle. What is your reason? What do you want to accomplish? What’s your ultimate goal? These are main questions you should answer before you begin.
The reason they are so important is that when you start something new like a side hustle, it’s going to take a lot of work and dedication. You will have times when you feel like giving up. So when you define your “why”, it will keep you going during those difficult times so you don’t give up on your dreams before you even get started.
Furthermore, you have to begin to change and reinvent yourself from being just an employee to an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur focuses on the business – so you have to focus on what actually drives a business forward.
The first thing is visibility. Every single business and side hustle needs to be visible, searchable, and branded well. If nobody knows you exist, you’re invisible. Whatever product or service you provide every single day; you have to show up. You have to be visible in front of your customers and in this day and age it is very important. In order to work on visibility, you must master the world of marketing and sales.
On top of this, you’ll need to master yourself because a part of achieving success is about mastering your mentality. So much of business nowadays is about personal development and you will see that with most successful individuals out there have a solid mindset.
They understand that it takes:
- Focus
- Perseverance
- Self confidence
- Acceptance and love for yourself
- Gratitude
- Humility
- Patience
These are generally some of the qualities of a successful entrepreneur – someone who knows it takes patience and perseverance and a bit of self love. Make sure you’re continuously reading, meditating, journaling, and working on your general awareness. This will help you to keep hustling when things get tough.
Vision & Goals
Do you have a vision for your side hustle? Or in other words, what is your intention on how you want the hustle to progress? Think about yourself in 10 years. Where do you want it to be?
Think about all of these things and create this vision in your mind of how you want it to look like. This is because if you don’t know where you want to be, you won’t know how you are going to get there. Once you really do that thinking process, go ahead and write it on paper. Either put it as a sort of a vision statement that you have for yourself or create a vision board for yourself and place it somewhere you can see every day. It will help you stay focused and motivated on what you are doing because you can see where you are going and why you are going there.
Realization
When you start something on the side, you need to remember you’re a beginner. Don’t go into your side hustle with the expectation that you are going to learn everything really quickly or that you’re going to be awesome at everything. You need to realize that it’s going to take you time to learn everything and there is a lot you don’t know.
Give yourself that space. Give yourself time to master new skills and don’t be hard on yourself, even if everything takes you longer than you thought it would take. Patience is key.
Do your research. Research how long other successful people’s journeys were and what steps they made to achieve their wealth. Even though it’s not a great thing to compare with others, having that frame of reference can you help you manage expectations. It’ll help engrain in you that success is not going to happen overnight.
Planning
Planning gives you a huge advantage. The first step you have to do is figure out when are you actually going to be working on your side hustle. If you have a career and family, there’s obviously going to be a limited amount of time for you to work on your side hustle.
So before you actually start doing anything, plan if you will be waking up early or staying up late. Will you be using lunch breaks to do work? Weeknights? Weekends? Or all of the above? The main thing is you want to plan a time that you can stay consistent with.
Once you have figured out when you are going to work on your side hustle, write down a list of tasks you will do to make your side business a success. For example, if your side hustle is a blog, then you may have tasks like writing posts, proofreading them, finding photos to insert, creating pin images for Pinterest, promoting posts on social media, and other things of that nature. You’ll also need to learn SEO to make sure your posts are searchable. Figure out what side hustle you’ll be pursuing, what steps will get you to your goals, and then match which tasks will be done at which times/days.
So if you’ve decided you’re going to wake up an hour earlier each day to work, what tasks from your list are going to be done in that hour? You want to have a plan of action so you know exactly what you need to do each day in order to meet the goals that you have for your side hustle.
Execution
Now that you have a plan of action, it is time for the execution phase. Start doing what you have set out to do, but make sure that you stop and evaluate how that plan is working for you every few months.
A lot of people execute without the right priorities in mind. You NEED to make sure that you focus on the 20% of efforts that are making 80% of the results. That’s why constant evaluation of your progress is important. When you see what’s working you can change your plan to become more focused on that activity that’s producing results. And when you see 0 results from your work, maybe it is time to re-evaluate.
Your plan isn’t set in stone – allow yourself to constantly change it to become more efficient towards your goals. Also allow it to change to fit your lifestyle better so that YOU are the most productive self you can be. For example, if mornings end up not working for you as you become too tired to work, adjust accordingly.
Also, make sure you ask for help. If you are starting a side hustle or a side business, it might be good to ask your family members to help you out. During those beginning stages when you have a lot to learn, you might need to spend more time on your business than you anticipated. Go ahead and ask for help. It doesn’t even have to be around the business. Maybe it is as simple as asking your partner to stay with the kids while you dedicate two hours on Sunday morning to go to a coffee shop to do some work.
Stay Focused on Your Own Business
It’s a bad idea to compare yourself. Don’t look at other people, don’t be distracted by what they are doing with their business. As long as you are doing the right thing and putting in the right amount of effort, your hustle will be productive. Concentrate on what you want for your side hustle, for yourself and your family.
This also means that you may need to eliminate things in your routine that may be out of line with your goals and plans. Take a closer look at what you are doing, where you spend your time and evaluate whether that is related to the priorities that you have for your hustle. Do you need that Netflix time? Do you need to play hours of video games? Those activities may take up crucial time that you need to be using to run and grow your business. Also, look at the tasks that are actually related to the productivity of your side hustle and see which ones are bringing you the most impact. Concentrate only on those – just like what was mentioned about the 80/20 rule.
Let go of anything that is time consuming but doesn’t really bring you any results. Be intentional with your actions, with the vision that you have and go all in. Go after your goals because nobody else will do it for you. A good way to achieve this is to concentrate on one thing at a time. So whatever you are doing, don’t try to multitask!
Learning
The last part of this process is learning. Like mentioned previously, you are going to be a beginner when you are starting your side hustle. There is a lot that you’ll learn and that learning is probably never going to stop. If you’re not growing and learning, you’re probably not doing it right. Every side hustle should require a lot of constant learning. Even when you’ve got a lot of the foundations down, you can still learn how you can optimize your businesses or scale up.
Set aside some time to dedicate towards continuous learning. There are so many free resources available for you to make your work more efficient and effective. So it is simply time wasting if you are trying to do everything without learning how to make it more efficient – smart work beats hard work.
If you are struggling with a specific area, Google is your best friend. Search on Google or search on YouTube and just watch videos to find tricks and tips from people who are already doing it. Another research I like using is Linkedin Learning. Utilize those resources to make things easier for yourself.
Conclusion
In order to balance your side hustle with your full-time job, have the right mindset, plan, and then execute. When you start, you are going to find out that you don’t know a lot and that’s okay. It is a journey – so take your time, concentrate on your “why”, and follow the dream that you have for yourself. In no time your side hustle will be so huge, and you won’t need to work that 9 to 5 job any more!
Hope you enjoyed this post and let us know in the comments below if you have advice on how to start a side hustle while working full-time.
